4月23/24日讲座｜多伦多大学白若云教授：以《不完美受害人》为例谈中国女性主义电视剧 4月23/24日云端讲座｜多伦多大学白若云教授以《不完美受害人》为例谈中国女性主义电视剧

A virtual talk by Professor Ruoyun Bai on women-centered TV drama in China this Thursday evening (April 23). mp.weixin.qq.com/s/3TpAIt6plC...

缅怀荷兰莱顿大学汉学家宋汉理教授(Harriet Zurndorfer, 1946–2026) 缅怀荷兰莱顿大学汉学家宋汉理教授(Harriet Zurndorfer, 1946–2026)

Remembering Professor Harriet Zurndorfer (1946-2026) of Leiden University. ://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/GBGiQmAkKupx7yPbKYlHrA

@yingaa.bsky.social

It seems like, well, an opportune time to push this paper again. We find qualitative similarities in how the Chinese and American governments produce economic statistics, but even we couldn’t anticipate how quickly those similarities would strengthen…

Dear friends, I’m excited to share that my new book is finally out.
The University of Chicago Press is offering a 30% discount for the book—just use the code UCPNEW if you’re interested.
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
Cheers, and thank you again for being part of this journey!

Haven't found the time to post here for quite some time while working hard to finish the book manuscript (noted above). At last, the book is close to completion and scheduled to come out next year from Cambridge University Press.

The Rise of the Qing Juridical Field and Its Impact on Judicial and Legal Culture - Max Planck Law Drawing on the insights of prior scholarship, Professor Chen’s speech will inquire an expansive legal community in late imperial China and further challenge the once-dominant view in traditional histo...

The ‘China, Law, and Society’ Initiative hosts the online lecture on 28 November. Li Chen (@lchen2024.bsky.social) examines the emergence of a late imperial legal community and its role in shaping Qing judicial culture: law.mpg.de/event/the-ri... #InitiativeEvent

This will be a terrific opportunity for early-career scholars of legal history, particularly those working on non-Western legal cultures.

China Halts Critical Rare Earth Exports as Trade War Intensifies (Gift Article) Beijing has suspended exports of certain rare earth minerals and magnets that are crucial for the world’s car, semiconductor and aerospace industries.

A gift article from NYT on China's suspending of rare earth exports. The nearly 2000 comments by readers are particularly worth reading :)
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/b...

Snowy Winter in Toronto!

Happy Lunar New Year to you all! May this year of snake bring you happiness, good health, and success in all your endeavors.

Trump Tests the Boundaries of the Presidency (Gift Article) Even more than in his first term, President Trump has mounted a fundamental challenge to the norms and expectations of what a president can and should do.

I meant to link a different NYT article instead of this one which has been shared last time. But here is the new NYT gift article.
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/u...

A typo. Should be Han Zheng.

An interesting followup. The Chinese government has agreed to send Vice President/Chairman Han Zhen to attend Trump’s inauguration ceremony—a gesture of goodwill and a "meet-in-the-middle" approach. Trump just had a seemingly positive phone conversations with Xi. It’s a wait-and-see situation now.

For those interested, a virtual talk this Friday (in Chinese).

New paper posted to SSRN, a few more to come later this week. The primary claim in this one is that legality and authoritarianism can be politically and administratively synergistic. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

When I read the news, my first thought was: Isn’t this just another way of currying favor with Trump by gifting him $15 million? How is this any different from bribery? :)

12月20/21日国际学术会议：“寻找秦汉帝国：传世文献与出土文献的碰撞” (线下+线上） 12月20-21日秦汉历史国际学术会议：“寻找秦汉帝国：传世文献与出土文献的碰撞” （线下+线上）

A virtual conference: "In Search of Early Chinese Empires: The Dynamics between Excavated Manuscripts and Transmitted Texts"; Easter Time: (1) 7:30 pm, Dec. 20-- 4 am Dec. 21; (2) 7:30 pm, Dec. 21-- 4am Dec. 22, 2024
Zoom registration link:
notredame.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Typo: "Given Trump's love of personal diplomacy."

The reason offered for rewarding their persistence is also interesting.

How dedicated were late imperial Chinese literati to the civil service exams? Many failed 10 times (about 30 years), but how old could they be? Even the emperors felt compelled to give honorary degrees if they failed again, say, in their late 80s, as seen in the 1852 request for a xiucai, aged 89.

China’s Critical Minerals Embargo Is Even Tougher Than Expected (Gift Article) Beijing ordered companies around the world not to allow critical minerals mined in China to reach the U.S., while deepening its efforts to replace imports with domestic products.

Another NYT gift article, on another tactic China has borrowed from U.S. practices on int'l trade: ban on transshipment of exported products by foreign companies to a 3rd country (U.S.). The U.S.-China trade war may escalate quickly if Trump does go all in next year.
www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/b...

方法｜陈利：“隐形档案”与史料深挖四步法 最近二三十年间, 欧美的人文社会科学研究领域中形成了一个所谓“档案转向” (archival turn) 的学术潮流。

A chapter from the recently published Chinese anthology "Law, Knowledge, and Power in the Age of Empire," providing some critical reflections on the use and analysis of historical archives in the field of Chinese (legal) history. t.cn/A6mCvA2N ​​​

One of my favorite books in the modern China field, not necessarily because we read chapters of her book manuscript in one of my first doctoral seminars at Columbia before it became an award-winning book :).

In the Qing period, these two-, three-, or even four-register page formats were used quite often in treatises on the Qing Code or forensic examinations (Xiyuan lu) due to their efficient and convenient allocation of the limited space, even in well-printed commercial editions for muyou & officials.

Pictures from the western end of "China proper" as famously noted by the Tang-era poet Wang Wei: "I urge you to drink another cup of wine/For beyond the Yang Pass, there will be no old friends."劝君跟进一杯酒/西出阳关无故人.The first one shows remains of the earliest (Qin-Han) Great Wall from over 2000 years ago.

Added you to Late Imperial China SP.

But the problem with ✘ may be precisely because it has too much political information, esp. all kinds of misinformation, as Trump and Musk like to call it :).

China has been surprisingly restrained in its responses to the many U.S. trade/high-tech bans and sanctions over the past eight years, possibly because the current PRC leadership does not want to add international crises to its already very serious economic woes at home.

China Announces a Ban on Rare Minerals to the U.S. The move comes a day after the Biden administration expanded curbs on the sale of advanced American technology to China.

This is what I warned about before: Other countries, once they gain their competitive advantages, can and will borrow the U.S. playbook to arbitrarily impose trade or high-tech restrictions, also claiming "national security/interest" or "dual-use" as the pretext.
www.nytimes.com/2024/12/03/w...

I should have mentioned this earlier (but was constrained by the word limit): these two registers include royal pets exclusively from the period of 1822–1850 (the Daoguang period).